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Changing hoop dreams Europeans prove that Caucasian players can flourishPosted: Monday July 01, 2002 10:20 AM
Years ago, when Toni Kukoc was a rookie with the Chicago Bulls, I saw him dunk several times in a game. Afterward, I jokingly suggested to him that he was proving that white men can jump, after all. Kukoc, a Croatian, gave me a puzzled look, totally unaware of the stereotype to which I was referring. Seems no one had ever told him that white men can't jump. Kukoc was part of the first trickle of what now has become a steady stream of players from across the pond entering the NBA. They're coming to America, Euros who've got game, apparently blissfully unaware of what has become a usually unspoken but largely accepted fact in this country: NBA hoop dreams are mostly the province of black youth. Part of the reason that players like Dirk Nowitzki , Peja Stojakovic and Vlade Divac have achieved stardom -- and others, including many of the record 17 foreign-born players who were chosen in last week's draft, seem set to follow -- is that they didn't grow up in the American hoops culture. Here, let's face it, white kids are subliminally given the message that they have almost as little chance of becoming the MVP of the NBA as a black kid has of becoming president. When it comes to basketball, Caucasian kids are subject to the same kinds of lowered expectations that plague too many African-American children in other areas. A survey a few years ago by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University discovered that nearly 70 percent of African-American kids believed they someday would play in the NBA, a proportion almost double that of Caucasian kids. That's largely because white kids get the message early on that they are inferior players, that, generally speaking, they'll eventually fall behind their black counterparts. It's not unlike African-American children, especially the ones from the inner city, who get direct and indirect hints that they're not expected to be able to keep up academically with Caucasian children. Tell a kid, any kid, something often enough, and eventually he will begin to believe it. But the white Europeans coming into the NBA haven't had stereotypes thrown in their faces from the time they were learning to dribble. Stojakovic didn't grow up being picked last in pickup games because the other players assumed his skin color meant he was probably a stiff. No one told Nowitzki that 7-foot white players aren't supposed to be nasty enough to slash down the lane and "posterize" people with vicious dunks. Kukoc never heard that because he's Caucasian, he couldn't have the flair and creativity to deliver passes from behind his back and between his legs. The emergence of the European player means, of course, that every African-American kid's odds of hitting the NBA jackpot just got even longer. The little boy in Detroit with big hoop plans now has to think not only about competing with the kids from Chicago, L.A and New York, but also he has to worry about the ones from Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic. Listen closely and you can already hear what sounds to me like resentment from some quarters of the black sporting public. TNT analyst Kenny Smith said the number of foreign draftees should be a "wakeup call" to American players. Columnists have suggested that NBA teams would be only too happy to see an even greater influx of white players who might make the game more appealing to white fans. This gets into dangerous territory; the only sure thing is that sports is still enough of a meritocracy that teams would never take an inferior player just because of his skin color. But if the Denver Nuggets' small forward is from Bosnia-Herzegovina instead of Bedford-Stuyvesant, so be it. There is no law that says the NBA has to be dominated by African-American players. If the racial makeup of the league changes significantly, maybe a few of those black kids who were dreaming of wearing an NBA uniform someday will be more likely to recognize the folly of banking on a one-in-10-million shot. Once that happens, they might discover that there are other dreams that are just as worth having. Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com. |
